Gray Redemption (Tom Gray #3) (20 page)

Harvey found himself warming to
Kyle, his easy-going approach making him a likeable sort, but concerns about
his ability to pull off the mission pushed those thoughts aside.

“It might get a bit hairy,” he
warned.  “If the first container looks big enough to hold a couple of
dozen people, Dennis and I will follow it, otherwise it’s yours.   We
have no idea which one contains the people we’re looking for, and we don’t know
where or when it’s going to be hit.  We don’t even know how many people
will be looking for it.”

“Lots of imponderables,”
Ackerman said, as the smile melted away and his demeanour suddenly went into
professional mode.  “Don’t
worry,
I’m not stupid
enough to take on an army all by myself.  If I see anything suspicious,
I’ll let you guys know.”

Harvey nodded, his confidence in
the man growing by the minute.  He handed over the card Carla had given
him.

“Take this,” he said. “I prefer
brunettes.”

Kyle screwed it up and tossed it
into a nearby bin.

“Been there, done that,” he
winked.

The ship was due to dock at any
moment, but it could be hours before the containers they were interested in
were ready to come ashore.  Harvey knew they wouldn’t be able to park at
the service station for long without arousing suspicion, but for a while they
would be a lot less conspicuous than if they were to park right on the
junction, and the truck would have to pass them on its way to the highway.

They went into the service
station and ordered coffee before finding seats near the window so that they
could keep an eye out for the distinctive Wenban livery.  Their thoughts
turned to the mission ahead, and after all the preparation, all they could do
now was wait.  Owen had prepared passports for both Smart and Baines, and
two more were waiting to be processed once they had new photos for the other
two passengers.  There was still no confirmation that the mysterious Sam
Grant was one of them, and Harvey thought back to the file that was currently
locked in his hotel room safe.

He’d studied the picture time
and time again, and while it still seemed like a composite, the eyes had once
again struck him as remarkably familiar. 

Hopefully the next few hours
would provide some answers.

*
* *

An hour and a half later, just
as Hamad Farsi was informing Harvey that no matches had been found within the
images — either within their own database or Interpol’s — Sean Littlefield
drove past the service station and continued down Bayhead Road until he reached
the junction with Langeberg Road, the arterial route leading from the cargo
terminal.

“It’s going to be a long wait,”
he observed as he parked the Mercedes Sprinter van.

Ben Palmer nodded, but his
thoughts were on the operation that lay ahead.

Since getting the message from
Farrar, he’d been thinking about the take down, and they’d stopped off at a
hardware store on the way to buy a few items.  He got out of the passenger
seat and climbed into the back of the van to prepare his improvised munitions.

With the need for subtlety gone,
Palmer had wanted to get his hands on some proper grenades rather than the
flash-bangs Littlefield had provided.  He didn’t know if his targets would
be armed, but experience told him that it was always safer to assume they
were.  Unfortunately, it was too late in the day to acquire the real
thing, so Palmer set to work adapting the flash-bangs so that they would be as
lethal as fragmentation grenades.

His first task was to cut out a
piece of cellophane the same height as the barrel of the M84 stun grenade and
long enough to wrap around it, plus an extra three inches.  The grenade
had a thin aluminium core surrounded by a perforated steel body, which allowed
the magnesium-based pyrotechnic to escape and temporarily blind the
victims.  Palmer’s plan was to wrap layers of putty heavily impregnated
with small steel screws around the barrel.  It was based on the principle
that if you set off a firecracker in the palm of your hand, you burn your hand,
but if you wrap your fingers around it, you’ll never play the piano again.

  The M84 produces a
subsonic deflagration rather than a supersonic detonation, but by encasing it
in the putty the effect of the blast would be magnified, and the screws would
be as deadly as any bullet.  He’d considered using ball bearings, just
like those found in Claymore mines, but the irregular shape of the screws would
produce more collateral damage, tumbling as they entered the bodies, tearing
flesh and fragmenting bone.  The idea wasn’t to inflict pain, just to
cause as much shock to the system as possible so that the body shuts down.

Palmer used the first piece of
cellophane as a template to produce another eight before cutting out slits in
each one to accommodate the grenade’s handle,
then
smeared the first three with a thin veneer of the putty.  He sprinkled
around fifty screws onto each sheet and used the putty tin to roll them
flat.  Once he’d trimmed off the excess, he wrapped a sheet around each of
the M84s, using electrical tape to hold them in place.  After waiting a
few minutes to let each layer dry, Palmer repeated the process twice more until
the grenades were completely encased.

The sun had set by the time the
weapons were ready, and the container was still an hour away from being
offloaded.  Trucks filed past as he climbed back into the passenger seat,
some destined for local trading estates, the majority heading inland.

“All set?”  Littlefield
asked, and Palmer nodded.

*
* *

When Arnold Tang’s car pulled up
to the entrance of the Hong Wing restaurant, the owner was already standing
near the entrance ready to welcome him.  The visitor was quickly shown to
a table near the rear, where waiters were busy laying place settings.

“Are you dining alone?” 
The manager asked, and Tang informed him that a friend would be along
shortly.  His henchmen took their positions at a nearby table as Tang sat
in a chair facing the door, and a bottle of Remy Martin Louis XIII was quickly
placed in front of him.

A few minutes later, Koh Beng
Lee arrived with his own entourage.  Arnold greeted him and poured two
glasses of cognac, and they exchanged small talk until the waiter arrived to
take their order.  Once he was gone, Lee steered the conversation towards
business.

“I have another twenty people
from Singapore ready to make the journey west,” he said.  “When is the
next ship leaving?”

“On the twentieth,” Tang told
him.  “How do you want them to travel once they reach Durban?”

Lee knew the options open to
him.  Tang had two tiers of travel, the first and cheapest being overland
from Durban to Morocco.  After a short ferry ride to Spain it would be
overland all the way to Calais for the short hop to Dover.

The second option cost an extra
ten thousand US dollars and meant a plane ride to the north of the continent,
shaving fifteen days off the journey and avoiding a lot of dicey border
crossings.

As the people making the journey
tended to be the poor looking for a better life, very few could afford option
two.

“They will all be going overland,”
Lee told him, and gestured to one of his men, who brought over a
briefcase.  He opened it to reveal bundles of fifties, and Tang
nodded.  He wouldn’t insult his friend by counting it, and Lee already
knew the consequences of being so much as a dollar short.

Tang placed the case on the
floor next to his feet and poured another two drinks.

“I trust you heard about Timmy
Hughes,” Lee said as he savoured the spirit.  “He was a good customer of
mine.  I understand you had...dealings with him, too.”

Tang’s demeanour shifted
instantly at the mention of the name.  “What about him?”

“You didn’t hear?”

“Obviously
not.”

“He was killed two weeks
ago.  Shot in the head, I was told.”

Tang rubbed the bridge of his
nose as he digested the news,
then
suddenly banged a
meaty fist on the table.  One of his men ran over, hand inside his jacket
and ready to draw down if his boss was in danger.  Tang waved him away and
pulled out his mobile phone.

“Where is the last
shipment?”  He barked.  It took a moment for his new lieutenant to
find the information, and that got Tang wondering. 

Was Hughes’ death somehow linked
to the disappearance of two of his men a fortnight earlier?  They were
good men, and had handled the people smuggling operation efficiently before
they suddenly vanished.  Was another player trying to move into his
territory?  Had they simply decided to work for someone else, or had they
been taken out in an effort to cripple his business?

Anger boiled within him, his
face taking on a crimson hue. 

The first thing to deal with was
Hughes’ fare-dodging friends.  When his lieutenant came back on the line
he was told that the ship had landed in South Africa an hour earlier.

Tang had already given
instructions for the passengers to be killed once they’d arrived in England and
he’d received his payment from Hughes, but as that money was never going to
arrive, there was no point in paying for an unnecessary plane journey.  He
was going to be slightly out of pocket on the deal, and the passengers would
pay for it.

“Call
Leng
in Durban.
  Get him to cancel the
gweilo
’
s
flight,
then
I want him to take them somewhere remote and dispose of
them.”  He thought for a moment, then added:  “Tell him to rape the
woman and make the men watch, then kill them all.”

He hung up and poured himself a
large measure of cognac.  The possibility that someone might be making a
move on his operation would gnaw at him for days, and the death of the
gweilos
would be
small recompense.

Chapter
12

Monday
May 7th 2012

“Here we go.”

Andrew Harvey saw the blue truck
with lightning flashes approach the service station and he grabbed his coat,
following Owen out of the door.

“Follow the next one, and be
careful,” he warned Ackerman, who nodded solemnly.

They allowed several other
vehicles to get between them and the target, both men making a mental note of
the drivers and passengers.  Owen eventually pulled into the traffic and
saw the red container roughly a quarter of a mile down the road.

“Don’t get too close unless it
leaves the expected route,” Harvey said, angling the rear-view mirror so that
he could see who was behind them. 

The truck turned left onto the
coast road, retracing their earlier steps, before obligingly hitting the M4
on-ramp which led to the Wenban compound.  The road threaded its way
through central Durban before heading to Durban Beach and hugging the coast as
it meandered north.  By now only three vehicles remained between them and
the truck, and that soon fell to two.  Traffic was disappointingly light at
this time of night, and Owen held off the throttle to allow the gap to open up.

After twenty minutes, one of the
cars ahead pulled off the M4 at an off-ramp, and Harvey checked the mirror for
the hundredth time and saw that their tail was clear.

“That has to be our guy,” he
said, indicating to the van up ahead.

Owen agreed.  “Sure you
don’t want me to just pull him over?”

“No,” Harvey said.  “Slowly
overtake them both and then stay half a mile ahead of the truck.” 

He pulled his phone out and
prepared the video camera before holding it to his ear.  The powerful BMW
closed the gap easily and they cruised past the van, Harvey recording the
driver’s face while simultaneously noting the licence number.  By the time
they’d eased ahead of both vehicles, Harvey had plenty of footage.  He
scanned through it quickly and saw the lone driver, a man in his fifties. 
Not recognising him, he sent the video to Farsi along with a note requesting
details of the van’s owner.

Owen opened up a lead on the
target vehicles before slowing to match their speed.

“We should reach Wenban in about
ten minutes,” he said.

Having scoped out the route a
few days earlier, Harvey knew that there was just one more off-ramp before the
highway took them past the compound, and it was just a few minutes up the
road.  If the truck continued past it, his gamble would have paid
off.  If it took the turning, it would be another fifteen minutes before
they could get off the highway and try to find it again.

His heart beat faster as the BMW
slid past the turn off and he willed the truck to follow.  He watched the
headlights in the mirror as they appeared to crawl along the tarmac and he
muttered to himself as the seconds ticked by.

“Come
on,
come on, a little more...”

He let out an audible sigh of
relief as the truck trundled past the off-ramp and continued to follow
them.  

“Okay, head for the warehouse
opposite the Wenban compound.  We’ll park behind it and see what they do
once they get there.”

Owen gunned the engine and they
pulled away from the miniature convoy.  By the time they pulled off the
highway and reached the warehouse they were around four minutes ahead of the
truck, and Owen parked up around the back of the derelict building.  As
Harvey got out he noted that theirs were the only fresh tyre marks in the loose
dirt, which meant it was unlikely their quarry would choose the same location —
anyone worth their salt would have scoped the area out, and this place hadn’t
been visited in months.

He pushed his way through a hole
in the fence and sprinted to the front of the warehouse, where he checked that
the front gate he’d oiled on his previous visit moved without making a
sound.  Satisfied that he could get out of the compound without being
heard, he tucked down behind a row of rusting oil drums.  A moment later,
Owen joined him, zipping up his black jacket as he sank to his knees.